Opinion: Cash, not coddling, needed from Carr

Senator Kim Carr cut a rather uncomfortable figure during his recent attendance at the BIO convention in San Diego. Not only was he at the end of a gruelling schedule of meetings with different industry groups and bureaucrats in the US, taking him to talks with pharmaceutical industry representatives in New York, lobbying for the Square Kilometre Array telescope and addressing the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, commiserating with the automotive industry in Detroit and visiting universities and institutes in California, he was obviously distinctly unwell and looked like he needed nothing more than a fluffy doona and a nice cup of Lemsip.

While he put a brave face on his illness and soldiered on mightily at BIO, staying a full two days, giving the required speeches and facing the required cameras, he must have been fully aware that while sympathy was on his side for being sick, and good will was on his side for turning up when his predecessors were never too keen on doing so, the 450-strong Australian biotech contingent at the convention was absolutely, utterly and incontrovertibly fuming at him. Fuming is actually too gentle a word: in our glorious vernacular, the term that sums up the whole situation best is spewing.

For the biotech industry is spewing at the Minister, and he knows it. The whole country was warned before the May 13 federal budget that the purse strings were going to be tightened, but no one in biotech had any inkling of just how drastic the cuts would be. The biggest cut of all was the scrapping of the Commercial Ready program, which was sold by the Government as saving half a billion dollars of public money and ending the profligacy that infected the previous administration. The fact that most of the money was then shuffled into the widely derided Green Car Innovation Fund, with a sop to new businesses with the creation of Enterprise Connect, an advisory service, didn't really help. The point of Commercial Ready was cash, not coddling, a point seemingly lost on a government that says it is committed to innovation and science but for the time being seems reluctant to stump up for it.

Carr assures us that all existing commitments under Commercial Ready will be met - worth about $200 million over four years - and this saving will free up money for better initiatives down the track. However, this did not help the people who were half way through the difficult process of applying for the fund and who had been hard at work schmoozing venture capitalists for matching funds, and nor did it help those who were encouraged by the Department to submit applications just weeks before the budget. Obviously, this decision came out of the blue to the public servants as well, which has caused even more rancour amongst the biotech people.

Unfortunately, there's not much they can do about it but wait until the green paper from the National Innovation Review is released, which will be shortly, and then the white paper at the end of the year. In the meantime, biotech industry representatives are reduced to writing letters of outrage to the review's chair, Terry Cutler, and other assorted personages in charge. The whole situation has made them feel helpless and, more importantly, hopeless. Unfortunately for the new minister, the balance on the good-will ledger is wobbling precariously.

Not so despondent was Victorian Premier John Brumby, who absolutely loves going to BIO and inevitably brings with him swags of good news. Brumby hit the ground running, getting in before his main foe in the biotech state of origin battle, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, with a fantastic announcement about a supercomputer for the life sciences for Melbourne University. That announcement hit every single headline possible but you could tell he was only getting started. More was to come with the announcement of a memorandum of understanding with the state of California on stem cell research, where Brumby got to invoke the name of Arnold Schwarzenegger and haul up Alan Trounson for a speech. The fact that the Governator later taunted Australia for stealing Trounson away from us only added to the fun.

The bananabenders had some good announcements and a very well attended press conference, Bligh as relaxed and good-humoured as always, promising that under the third iteration of Peter Beattie's Smart State plan funding will be directed more towards people rather than infrastructure, or "from bricks to brains" as she put it. A very chipper Verity Firth, the newby NSW minister for science, also attended. She seemed to realise after a day or two that she was losing the press release wars with the Queenslanders and Victorians and had to crank out a few, but at least she was able to turn up, unlike WA Premier Alan Carpenter, who had to pull out at the last minute as something large and gaseous had blown up in Perth.

Who knows if Carr will be able to attend BIO 2009, which is being held in Atlanta in the middle of May to avoid the horrors of Georgia's summer heatwaves. That will be federal budget time again, and for the biotech industry at least, a repeat of this year's experience may send that aforementioned trend on the good-will ledger plummeting.